Page:King Camp Gillette - The Human Drift (1894).djvu/11

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PREFACE
vii

I advocate a system of united intelligence and material equality, under which system, the perfection of the machinery of production and distribution would be the constant and watchful care of the individual and collective mind.

I advocate a system where money and all representative value would be eventually done away with, and under which system, the manual labor incident to production and distribution would be equally apportioned to each individual without friction and with perfect justice.

The system of equalization of labor advocated, not only contemplates the maintenance in each avenue of necessary production and distribution of its required complement of laborers, but it allows each individual to select his or her own field of labor, and this without friction and with least manual labor possible in arriving at necessary results. Under this system, every individual would have the best and equal advantages of education. In material welfare every individual would be far better off than is possible to the most wealthy under present system; and to obtain all this would require less than an average period of five years of manual labor in a lifetime, and the field of competition would resolve itself to competition for intellectual supremacy,–the only legitimate avenue of progress, and the true solution of the survival of the fittest.

The writer may be accused of an unusual amount of sentiment in his denunciation of the present system but, if all the truth in testimony of the imperfections of the system could be brought together, it would be found his judgment was founded on cold-blooded facts, and where a wrong is known to exist, sentiment is the first indication of a recognition of such wrong and the birth of hope that justice will prevail. A man is ripe for any crime when he confines himself to the unjust principles of the laws of our system, and shuts out from heart and conscience the appeal of sentiment and sympathy.

BOSTON, Aug. 1, 1894.